Homeless ordered to vacate camp they were pressured into before Super Bowl

Now declared a public health hazard, the 21st-century Hooverville under a highway overpass became a symbol of San Francisco’s gaping inequality

‘If it was my front yard, I wouldn’t want to see this either. But you can’t keep running your problem from this side of town to another side of town. You have to just deal with it where it is,’ said a part-time bartender who is homeless.
Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Residents have been ordered to vacate the San Francisco homeless encampment under a highway overpass after police and public workers pressured the city’s homeless to relocate there from areas of the city slated for Super Bowl 50 festivities.

Then on 23 February, less than three weeks after the championship game, the San Francisco department of public health declared the encampments on several blocks of Division Street a public health hazard due to “accumulation of garbage, human feces, hypodermic needles, urine odors and other insanitary conditions”. Homeless residents were ordered to leave within 72 hours.

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“Conditions where multiple tents are congregated have become unsafe,” the director of health, Barbara Garcia, said in a statement. “People are living without access to running water, bathrooms, trash disposal or safe heating or cooking facilities.”

Cities all along the west coast are struggling to cope with large homeless populations. California, Oregon and Washington state account for 26% of the nation’s homeless, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

On Thursday, the LA Times reported that city officials had begun seizing tiny houses from homeless people, citing safety concerns with the informal structures. In Portland, Oregon, city officials are experimenting with a plan to legalize homeless camping in some locations.

Despite the impending deadline for vacating the area, more than a dozen tents remained on Division Street on Thursday morning, some displaying signs of defiance.

“Please help me and others find a solution rather than take/force/ask me and countless others to move! We are real people!” read a multi-colored sign affixed to one tent. Another handwritten sign read, “Your order to vacate has no legal standing.”

One camper was packing up and preparing to leave.

Michael G, a part-time bartender who asked not to be identified by his last name because his employer doesn’t know he is homeless, said that he has been homeless off and on for a few years due to the city’s “sky-high rents”.

“I don’t like it. I’m not partying. I’m freezing my ass off every night,” he said. “If I have to pay $1,000 a month for rent, I don’t have any money for food.”

Michael said he had moved to Division Street because people he knew were living there as well, which gives him a sense of safety.

“If it was my front yard, I wouldn’t want to see this either,” he said. “But you can’t keep running your problem from this side of town to another side of town. You have to just deal with it where it is.”

Michael was planning to move to a new temporary shelter that the city recently opened in a disused industrial shed on the waterfront. The giant building at Pier 80 once housed billionaire Larry Ellison’s America’s Cup yachts, but it has been refurbished to accommodate up to 150 people on mats on the floor.

“I’ve heard it’s nothing all that great,” Michael said, and few would disagree with him.

On Thursday, the city’s homeless tsar, Sam Dodge, admitted during a City Hall hearing on solutions to homelessness that the out-of-the-way warehouse, surrounded by a 15ft fence and barbed wire, was “intimidating” and not the ideal location for a long-term shelter.

But Michael and other Division Street residents need not necessarily travel the 2.5 miles to Pier 80. The surrounding neighborhood is spotted with smaller homeless encampments – a few tents here, a few tents there – and the public health department order to vacate applies only to certain blocks.

Antoine Crayton has been living in a tent on the sidewalk on nearby Vermont Street for about three months, and he has no plans to leave.

“The Vermont community is small,” Crayton said. “We have 12 tents and six RVs. It might as well be a gated community. Everybody knows everybody. We make sure no one’s breaking into cars. We have brooms. We clean up.”

It’s a landscape teeming with contradictions. Across the street from Crayton’s tent are furniture showrooms featuring bedroom sets costing thousands of dollars. Around the corner is a parking lot where Uber, which was recently valued at $62.5bn, performs car inspections for its drivers.

For his part, Crayton would rather live in a tent – he has a king-size bed and electricity from a car battery – than a homeless shelter, and he thinks the encampments are only going to continue to grow.

“The sidewalk is the only place to stay for people in my financial class. If you’re not going to incarcerate us and you’re not going to house us, where do you think we’re going to go?”